Engaging Many Minds

Katja Reuter*, Rachael Sak, Maninder Kahlon

*Presenter: Manager, Online Communications, Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI), University of California, San Francisco

Crowdsourcing: Virtual Community Collaborations in Academia

Expanding Communications ...

to enable new ways for researchers to interact, communicate and collaborate.

Website

Resources, Databases

E-Mail Service

Presenting Information Online

Research

Networking

Tools

Crowdsourcing

Tools

Research

Blogs

Catalyzing and Enabling New Ways for Researchers to:

• Communicate

• Interact

• Collaborate

...

Using a crowdsourcing approach to enable idea generation as a collaborative endeavor.

Transforming the types of research questions

that are generated and how teams are convened.

What is Crowdsourcing?

“the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to an undefined, large group of people or

community (a "crowd"), through an open call”.

WIKIPEDIA

Finding and leveraging the enormous potential of the “collective brain”

has a history outside of research.

Inspiration

Crowdsourcing models used in Industry

• e.g. IBM, Netflix, InnoCentive

Bestselling books and articles

• “The wisdom of crowds” (James Surowiecki, 2005)

• “The rise of crowdsourcing” (Jeff Howe, Wired, 2006)

• “We are smarter than me. How to Unleash the

Power of Crowds in Your Business” (Barry Libert

& John Spector, 2007)

We launched 3 pilot projects at the University of California, San Francisco

to crowdsource ideas for the best research projects.

Feb 2009 March 2009 July 2009

Target Audience

CTSI Leadership

~35

UCSF Research Community

~7500 people

CTSI Community/Affiliates

~300

Time Period

4 weeks6 weeks 5 months

ARRA: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Ideas for Economic

ARRA Stimulus Funding

Ideas for

CTSI Year 4

Ideas for CTSI Renewal Grant Proposal

What does the tool look like?

The tool provides the substrate to achieve several goals. It supports:

1. community building2. team assembly3. innovation management4. collaborative idea generation5. team work on proposals.

Features (Built off Drupal Content Management System)

Submit ideas

Comment on ideas

Vote (Like or Dislike)

Filter by Idea Topics

Sort Ideas by popularity or commenting

Receive E-mail Notifications for updates on ideas of interest

Revise collaboratively to move idea forward

View Idea Status

An Exemplary Discussion Thread

As part of the process,the tool itself was iteratively improved based on user input.

The solicited ideas focused on

research infrastructure and novel approaches

to improve the translation of basic discoveries into health benefits for the community,

known as clinical & translational research.

Unique Page Views = # of sessions during which the forum was viewed one or more times

Targeted Audience

IdeasSubmitted

CommentsSubmitted

VotesSubmitted

% Comments by Unique Page Views

% Votes by Unique Page

Views

CTSI Year 4 ~35 18 41 31 19% 14%

Economic ARRA Stimulus Funding

~300 27 39 75 8% 15%

CTSI Renewal Grant Proposal

~7500 53 47 65 9% 12%

The Process

Initiative supported and promoted by CTSI leadership ...

CTSI leadership evaluated and triaged submitted ideas, providing continual feedback online and via in-person meetings.

Idea Development and Cross-Pollination among other Virtual Communities

Promising ideas that could not be funded initially were transferred to the subsequent “Open Forum” initiative.

What did our users say?

15

Takeaway

Crowdsourcing tools can help leverage the potential for collaborative generation

of new and better ideas and collaborator finding in academia.

Sharing ideas transparently between otherwise seemingly competitive

proposals was received well.

Highlight focused incentives and senior sponsorship to users

Integrate online with real-world communication opportunities

Future work will aim at reaching broader, more distributed audiences beyond

UCSF and applying the lessons learned to the crowdsourcing of ideas to

address pressing biomedical research questions.

Thanks to the Virtual Home Team at CTSI, University

of California, San Francisco.

• Cynthia Piontkowski, Web Producer

• Kristine Moss, Web Manager

• Brad Bulger, Technical Consultant for Web Application Development

• Leslie Yuan, Director of Web Products